Toni Morrison, Remember
Sep. 1st, 2007 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanguinity posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
50books_poc3. Toni Morrison, Remember: The Journey to School Integration
The photos are amazing -- expressive, shocking, raw. I found the text to be fairly weak. Morrison imagines what the people in the photos might have been thinking, but generally, I found the photos more expressive than Morrison's imaginings. Additionally, there were many times that I found her text to be shy on context, and I chafed to know where one photo or another was taken, or who the characters actually were.
The last few pages of the book recap the photos with brief historical context for each -- the sort of information I had been pining for on my first read-through. I spent a while flipping between thumbnails and full versions, "re-reading" the photos in the context of their times, places, and events -- and then I came to a full stop. A photo of black children marching with anti-segregation posters was captioned as Hillsboro, Oregon, 1956. Hillsboro is twenty-five miles west of here. My partner's father grew up in Hillsboro, and would have been twenty-four when that photo was taken. I called![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grrlpup over and showed her the photo, and she reacted with the same shock I had -- this was something her father had never told her. But it's not like we haven't been surprised by Oregon's racial history before this.
Looking up the photo for this post, I discovered that the copyeditor/researcher/whoever misidentified it: the photo (U1103225, Bettmann/Corbis) is one of three taken at Webster Elementary in Hillsboro, Ohio. (Which doesn't answer the question of what I think I know about Oregon's history vs. what I actually know. More research is warranted.)
Just for kicks, I had a look around the 'net to see what the reviews are like. Some find Morrison's text powerful and evocative; others find it confusing and low on context. Kirkus Reviews has found at least one more factual error in the endnotes.
It's a gorgeous book. If I had a kid of the right age, I'd definitely use it with them. But I'd also want to study up and supply some of the context that the book doesn't provide.
The photos are amazing -- expressive, shocking, raw. I found the text to be fairly weak. Morrison imagines what the people in the photos might have been thinking, but generally, I found the photos more expressive than Morrison's imaginings. Additionally, there were many times that I found her text to be shy on context, and I chafed to know where one photo or another was taken, or who the characters actually were.
The last few pages of the book recap the photos with brief historical context for each -- the sort of information I had been pining for on my first read-through. I spent a while flipping between thumbnails and full versions, "re-reading" the photos in the context of their times, places, and events -- and then I came to a full stop. A photo of black children marching with anti-segregation posters was captioned as Hillsboro, Oregon, 1956. Hillsboro is twenty-five miles west of here. My partner's father grew up in Hillsboro, and would have been twenty-four when that photo was taken. I called
grrlpup over and showed her the photo, and she reacted with the same shock I had -- this was something her father had never told her. But it's not like we haven't been surprised by Oregon's racial history before this.Looking up the photo for this post, I discovered that the copyeditor/researcher/whoever misidentified it: the photo (U1103225, Bettmann/Corbis) is one of three taken at Webster Elementary in Hillsboro, Ohio. (Which doesn't answer the question of what I think I know about Oregon's history vs. what I actually know. More research is warranted.)
Just for kicks, I had a look around the 'net to see what the reviews are like. Some find Morrison's text powerful and evocative; others find it confusing and low on context. Kirkus Reviews has found at least one more factual error in the endnotes.
It's a gorgeous book. If I had a kid of the right age, I'd definitely use it with them. But I'd also want to study up and supply some of the context that the book doesn't provide.
